I’ve been feeling a bit down the last few days. Being sick again hasn’t helped (the recurring gift of daycare!), but I have been at a loss to find, budget or make more time to get work done.

Oh, how I wanted to like the extension to the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, dedicated to the greatest Alsatian surrealist, Jean/Hans Arp. I think Arp was “Rhenish” enough that the fact he wasn’t German should be looked. The extension is somehow related to Bonn’s losses when Berlin became the federal capital, even though Rolandseck is in a different state. For whatever reason it was built, it’s kind of an eyesore. My wife compared it to a riverboat. It dominates the environment in an unkind manner (sorry, Richard Maier).

Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar made a poor film in English, but it is a wonderful novel and film in German. It marked the beginning of new trends in Holocaust literature. Die Welt is carrying Louis Begley’s afterward to the new Suhrkampf edition (cruelly for us, translated from English into German). Begley stresses how Becker came out of the Holocaust with only piecemeal memories of the ghetto, that he had fear and anxiety as his greatest mementos. Becker used the novel to find a new vehicle for his memories, placing them into the form of a fairy tale.